Researching how to make a website load faster? If you are the owner of a website, blog or online store or any page on the web, wanting to make it load quickly is a must. Because it's already more than proven that pages that load quickly convert more.
And statistics prove what we just mentioned, slow sites that load in more than 3 seconds lose half of their visitors and potential customers. Google wants your site to load quickly, and your visitors want it even more.
So it's obvious that learning how to make your pages load faster is more than essential these days, as a slow site can even worsen your positioning in the ranking of organic searches. And of course you don't want that, right? Stay with us until the end, and check out valuable tips to make your pages load much faster.
How important is it to have a website that loads fast?
One of the main reasons for you to have sites and pages that load quickly is to offer the visiting user a excellent browsing experience. And mostly because the speed of a site is a factor in ranking. That's why it's so important.
Logically, the loading time of a page can depend on many factors such as the size and weight of the page, the speed and type of the user's internet network, the server where it is allocated (hosted), among others.
So even knowing that there are many factors that influence the loading time of websites on the internet, at least do what you can. Optimizations where many of them you will be able to perform yourself.
Improving your positioning in the rankings is always important, especially since this way you will get much more traffic, customer contact capture, and conversions into sales.
And we cannot fail to mention here the skyrocketing growth in the use of mobile devices, practically 70% of searches carried out in the world today are done via mobile. 5G technology is practically here. That's why making websites load faster is essential.
Having a responsive website that adapts to any type of device and screen size is no longer enough to meet the requirements of search engines, and of course users as well, who are more and more demanding every day. That's why it's very important to have a fast website.
Best tips on how to make a website load faster:
Now that you know how important it is to make your websites load faster, let's get straight to the point, after all, you're reading this article to learn how to improve your pages' loading time, follow the tips:
Speed:
If you want to know how to make a site open faster, then this is your first step before starting with performance optimizations, you need to know how the speed of the site is.
And you can do this using speed test tools, they will show you various information, from back-end, front-end, what is the current loading time of opening your pages, and much more.
These tools also show what's already ok on your pages, so you don't have to optimize or waste time with what's already working well. And what is not working well and causing the slowness, just make the corrections.
Many corrections can be done by yourself, but some we have to be honest, only a web developer to solve. And another important tip, perform tests frequently.
Hosting type:
Stay very attentive to this topic if you really want to learn how to make websites load faster, the type of hosting you use can be the main villain of all. If you still use a shared plan, forget about it, it's a thing of the past.
Using a shared type of hosting you will be sharing the server space with other web sites, which is bad, because the high traffic of many can harm your performance.
So to make your website fast, our recommendation is that you opt for Vps, Cloud or Dedicated hosting. They made their sites much more stable and with better performance and performance.
Because using a Vps, or Cloud, or Dedicated you won't be sharing the server space with anyone else, which is great. Another important point is Gzip compression, which will also help with performance and many hosting plans offer it for free, just activate it.
Use a CDN network:
Never stop using a content distribution network in your projects, or CDN network as it is known, as the name implies, it distributes all your content on several servers around the world. We recommend the Cloudflare where you can get started with the free plan.
This will help reduce latency (internet delay time) and will deliver your content much faster to the user. Let's assume that your website is hosted on a server in the USA, so a visitor from Rio de Janeiro accesses it, he won't even feel the difference, because the CDN will contribute to the loading speed. When making use of a CDN you will also be reducing server response time, which is essential for good performance.
Content Management System (CMS):
We don't know what your content management system (CMS) is, but it could also be making your site heavy and slow. There are many currently such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal among many others.
We always recommend making websites in WordPress, because with it it will be even easier to get your projects online faster. This CMS provides a series of plugins, tools and resources that can help in its performance. Best of all, they're easy to set up, not to mention many are free.
Image size and format:
For you to be able to make a page load even faster, then pay attention to the size and format of the images you are using, as they may not be optimized, slowing down your site.
Always before uploading a new image to your website, blog or Virtual store try to pass it through compression tools, there are several of them on the internet, one of the most used and the one we also use is the Tinypng. This tool will greatly reduce the file size of the images, thus making the pages much lighter and faster.
And we can't forget to mention state-of-the-art image formats, known as Webp images, they have much better compression than others like PNG and JPEG formats. Consume less data by speeding up loading.
You should also use lazy load on your images, as even images that don't yet appear on the screen for the user can make the site feel heavy. Then you can easily delay loading them with lazy load. That way they will only appear when the user scrolls down the page.
cache:
Use a caching system in your projects, as caching reduces the need for the server to keep sending the same information over and over again to web browsers that have already passed through your site.
Caching will generate a static page for all the pages on your site and will also store them for as long as you want in the settings.
In this way, the site loads faster, even avoiding server crashes in case of peaks of many simultaneous visits. Not to mention that if you use WordPress you can just install a caching plugin and configure it, it will minify HTML, Javascript and CSS codes making it much faster.
A good caching system or even a good caching plugin will also help you eliminate rendering-impairing resources that can slow down page loading.
Responsive template:
Regardless of which CMS you chose to make your website, always try to choose a theme that is responsive and lightweight, as this will load faster.
And always when choosing a theme, look for one that is very responsive and adapts to all types of devices and screen sizes. Have one responsive website it will only help its performance and it will load in much less time.
Conclusion:
We can conclude that having a website that loads quickly is more than essential for any type of online business, not only because it improves your ranking in searches, but also because of the good experience that users will have when visiting it. And just so you don't forget our tips, let's quickly recap them:
- Run speed and performance tests regularly;
- Choose good web hosting;
- Always make use of a CDN network to distribute your content across multiple servers;
- Optimize the size and format of your images;
- Make use of caching;
- Always use a lightweight and responsive template;
That's it folks, we really hope we've helped you, so now it's up to you, it's time to get your hands dirty and boost your pages. Success ?